Radio dial takes a turn for the worst

Published 4:00 am, Monday, May 12, 1997

JACK DAVIS birthday parties come and go, as anyone who's ever turned 50 in hell can attest, but the real disturbing news of the month came from the radio world.

KNBR, your window on middle-aged white men's tonsils, has cloned itself. The station's parent company has scooped up the previously unnoticed KOFY (1050 on the scan button), bought the rights to the Raider broadcasts and will try to recreate the magic of ESPN2 on your dial.

And yes, that probably means hour after hour of fitness shows, fishing shows, Australian Rules trivia and The World's Strongest Larynx Greatest Hits shows you can stand.

Now your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to find the answer to the musical question, "Who asked for this?"

Up until now, the Bay Area's sports radio needs were being met quite nicely by KNBR. It had lots of wattage, lots of game, lots of puerile nonsense, the very occasional insight, and of course, Rush Limbaugh - your standard sports radio fare, if truth be told.

CHUNKING OUT the equivalent of 120 hours of sports yak every week seemed to be meeting everyone's needs. KNBR had the market quite cornered, and quite covered. If you had an asinine nickname and wanted to trade Mark Portugal for Randy Johnson, you had a place to go, and all the time Pete Franklin could spare.

So when, exactly, did it become evident that we weren't getting nearly enough of what we probably don't need anyway?

As it happens, a couple of weeks ago. KNBR's lords and kings bought KOFY, snapped up the Raider broadcasts from the can-and-string operation they were so unhappy with last year (KYCY-FM, one of the Mary Chapin Carpenter All Day Every Day stations you couldn't avoid even if you were Vincent Van Gogh), and promptly eliminated any hope of competition in a field that has already oversaturated itself.

The question here isn't why. "Why" always has an answer, even if it isn't the answer you might desire. The question here is, "Oh, for God's sake, what the hell are you thinking?"

If KOFY, which will be renamed The Ticket, is going to become the Raiders' house concertina in the same way that KNBR has always hiked up its skirts for the Giants and Warriors, then all we have is more of what we already can't sufficiently process.

And what of the rest of the day? Jim Rome, followed by the Fabulous Sports Babe, followed by Scott Ferrall, followed by George F. Will's Infield Fly Rule Made Easy, followed by Tony Bruno Unplugged, followed by Dennis Rodman's MTV Files?

Isn't this already covered? And if you've been graced with ESPN2, haven't you already seen what duplication begets?

Here is your ESPN2 schedule for what is a relatively active week - the Stanley Cup playoffs and the Indianapolis 500 time trials most important.

In other words, 2-1/4 days of legitimate watching, 4-1/4 days of ghastly filler. In other words, SportsChannel on an eternal tape loop, heretofore aired only to make prisoners crack prior to interrogation.

AND THAT is only part of why KNBR LoCal makes such little sense. The rest is the next escalation. With KNBR essentially spewing Giants and Warriors party line, and KOFY (or whatever the new nightmare is to be called) hurling out Raider propaganda without hesitation, what is left but more cloning? An A's party line station? A Sharks party line station? A 49ers party line station?

Oops, sorry. Forgot all about KGO there for a minute.

Is our entire radio band width to be eaten up with sports stations yearning to mine the elusive preschool market ( "My dad says the Lakers suck. What's "Lakers'? And what's "suck'?" )? Is this the end of the previous hot radio fad, the right-wing knucklehead screed? Or the alternative-rock fad? Or the wacky-morning-zoo fad? Where the hell is radio going? And what happens to our ears when it gets there?

I don't know, but if Garrison Keillor turns up on Barbieri and Tolbert talking smack about Rick Barry, we will at least know that the Heaven's Gate cult was on to something.&lt;